Aug 26, 2016

Today is my daughter's 5th birthday! Yay! To celebrate, we will be spending a fun-filled day at a local fair where there'll be lots of fun rides and animal friends to meet and pet. I'm not into birthday parties at all. I prefer to spend birthdays having quality family time. So since today is her birthday, I thought I'd share a project that is special to me. I created a photo album for my daughter that includes her actual baby clothes and pictures of her wearing those clothes! I wanted to created something special using her baby clothes, and I've seen lots of quilts made from baby clothes, but I'm not a quilter. And at the time I had only been sewing for a year, so making a quilt seemed intimidating, so I came up with this idea instead.

To create this massive cloth photo album, I used felt, yarn, photos of my daughter, vinyl, and some of my daughter's old baby clothes. I selected a few of her outfits and cut them up to fit onto a sheet of felt. I sewed them onto the felt and used the left over fabric from the cut up clothes to make backgrounds for the photo pages. The photo album features pictures of my daughter wearing the clothes that were cut up for this photo book. Now on to the pictures!

The Process:

Step 1: I cut the clothing so that it would fit on a sheet of felt fabric, but I still wanted it to look like what it was before I cut it, of course. I pinned it onto the felt fabric sheet and used my sewing machine to sew it onto the felt.

Step 2: I pieced together left over fabric from the clothes and sewed them onto the felt sheet to create backgrounds for the photo pages.

Step 3: I placed the picture onto the photo page and sewed vinyl over it. I learned that the vinyl would not feed through the sewing machine properly unless it has the paper that comes with it still over it. The paper tears off easily once you're done sewing.

Step 4: Once all the outfits and pictures were sewn onto the pages, I figured out the order I wanted the pages to be in the book. Then, I used my skip stitch rotary cutter to punch holes around the edges of the pages.

Step 5: I had all the pages in order in a big stack. I with the pages back to back, I crocheted them together.

Step 6: Once all the pages were crocheted around the edges, I bound them together using yarn and a large yarn needle.

Step 7: For the spine of the book, I used hot glue to attach a piece of black felt.

Step 8: Since the front cover was a little short, I crocheted more yarn onto the edge, and then added a ladybug button and a strap to close the photo book.

The Photo & Clothing Pages:

My really good friend Irene gave my daughter this onesie.

I love anything with leopard and kitties!

This is one of the outfits my aunt sent my daughter.

This was one of my favorite outfits for her. I loved the red tutu, and it came with a little red cardigan, too.

Thanks so much, Katrin! It was a lot of work, but it was made with love, so it was worth it. I hope my daughter will love with when she's older. Right now, she just likes seeing pictures of herself. :-)